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IronTiger

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Everything posted by IronTiger

  1. IronTiger
    Not to mention The Woodlands has their own Market Street, and in Dallas and parts north, Market Street is a supermarket that is reportedly quite good.
  2. IronTiger
    I guess we could do it like New York City's Houston Street and just pronounce it in a completely different way.
  3. IronTiger
    Edited to avoid dogpiling
  4. IronTiger
    You make me laugh, and I'm trying to get a job in Houston, have been trying for the last four months, you bigot
  5. IronTiger
    Sounds like TexAgs, I immediately sympathize. Best of luck.
  6. IronTiger
    I mean avoiding active criminal activity, like scavengers throwing stuff at you. In broad daylight.
  7. IronTiger
    See, this is why it's a bad idea to venture off the beaten track...some rather iffy 'hoods in the area...I wondered around after downtown and all I found were slums or sprawl.
  8. IronTiger
    Please please please tell me that was mostly sarcasm.
  9. IronTiger
    I don't like the plan so much anymore. The whole thing looks like bowing to yuppies in the Midtown/Downtown area to remove the Pierce Elevated, all while: - Screwing up traffic even further in the area, including adding a bunch of nasty new curves to I-45 - Cutting into less fortunate neighborhoods to appease said yuppies who don't like the Pierce Elevated (talk about robbing from the poor and giving to the rich, eh?) - Wasting taxpayer money to build some mega-tunnel in connection with removing the Pierce Elevated (and you know, doing everything else) - Depriving any pleasure from motorists of seeing Houston from an elevated point of view ...and then some fools have the gall to want to turn the Pierce Elevated structure into a park, completely negating the original idea of removing it. That being said, I think *some* of the plan has merit: straightening out Interstate 10 near UH-D isn't a bad plan, really.
  10. IronTiger
    If the whole widening of 59/45 goes through and that gets sunken and turned into a deck park, then how could the Pierce Park integrate with that at all?
  11. IronTiger
    I agree to an extent. The whole "remove the Pierce Elevated" always reeks of yuppie sensibilities/NIMBYs and the subtle "put it through the poor neighborhoods" business that freeways originally were saddled with, and that's not even counting the fact that the Pierce Elevated doesn't actually disturb the grid like 59 currently does (near the downtown area). Most streets and even their beloved light rail goes right under it. That being said, the Pierce was an over-capacity, narrow highway. Lanes squeezed into just three lanes with no inner shoulder, and it would be unrealistic to expand the Pierce through double-decking or widening. The fact that they built mid-rises on the same block of the Pierce eliminated any realistic chance that the Pierce could be sunken and widened, but even that would be impossible since 59 was sunken in that part too. I sincerely hope that the whole project is actually designed to improve traffic flow and capacity and not just appease a bunch of whiny folks within a six-block radius of the Pierce. As it stands, the whole 59/288/45 intersection is...complicated.
  12. IronTiger
    I wonder if TxDOT will do land swaps when blocks of EaDo get shaved off?
  13. IronTiger
    Just like the Minnesota I-35 bridge, only a few gussets were actually compromised, but the rest of the bridge failed because of its design.
  14. IronTiger
    Oh, definitely. I would say Bagby too.
  15. IronTiger
    The preliminary plans do remove the Pierce but also involve a comprehensive re-do of the entire downtown-area freeway system, and Interstate 45 is being re-routed on its own separate lanes. (and what the timetable is, I don't know...by then the Pierce might be up for replacement anyway) What you were saying was that they should just remove the Pierce wholesale and then kind of shrugged on how traffic should adjust. Between that and insulting TxDOT at every turn, I don't think you're entitled to an "I told you so" moment.
  16. IronTiger
    It seems to me that the conspiracy theories were from people that really, really, hated the Bush administration. However, to make that work, one of three things has to be true. - They were hyper-competent and began working with the others on September 11th, and were feigning ignorance the rest of the time. This would break the whole "Bush administration was incompetent" theory that was running at least in the 2005-2008 days, and would be giving the Bush administration a lot of credit. Or... - They were aware of it but didn't/couldn't do anything to stop it and agreed to cover it up OR - They weren't aware of it at all would tend to exonerate Cheney and Bush, especially that last one, the "why weren't they interrogated separately". This is more complicated by the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which if that's a conspiracy would go far deeper back than the Bush (II) administration and put the blame on the Clinton administration for covering it up. Going forward, if there was a conspiracy, then the Obama administration is continuing to cover it up, or is incompetent and can't do a thing about it, which would put the blame on them as well. At this point, one could claim that all of the Presidents are shape-shifting reptilian humanoids from the Alpha Draconis star system.
  17. IronTiger
    Add another $100 million or so in modern dollars for the original building of the Woodall Freeway, too. I imagine with that, right of way, demolition, and traffic control, probably closer to $400 million.
  18. IronTiger
    That would be Clayton Homes, a subsidized housing complex. It should be relocated, but its not the residents' land.
  19. IronTiger
    I thought part of the reason people whined about the Pierce was BECAUSE it was an elevated structure with dark, spooky parts underneath and physically divided Midtown and Downtown.
  20. IronTiger
    Besides the fact that whatever evidence the government has (or other observations, like videos of REAL controlled demolition projects) is disregarded for a few people who may or may not be telling the truth is something that can't be reconciled...we could do this all day and you'd still have someone claiming the government knew, but really, some of the other "evidence" assumes modern technology in a bygone era. Remember, the world of pre-9/11 didn't have cameras everywhere like today, and they certainly weren't high resolution. DVD players were just starting to come out on the mainstream, and IF you had Internet access, you probably had dial-up, where at a 56k modem it would still take about 15-20 minutes to download a 1MB file (I remember that). Even longer if you had a 28.8. Google was an underdog player in search engines. Amazon sold only books and music. Video cameras were a lot more expensive (seriously, have you looked at old electronics ads and then accounted for inflation? I'm looking at an August 2001 MacAddict magazine, and there's a SCSI 2GB hard drive for $70...and that's in 2001 dollars). That's probably why the "controlled explosives" theory was so prevalent, actually--at the time, nobody really recorded demolitions like they do today and there was no YouTube to quickly look up how demolitions work.
  21. IronTiger
    Yes, there is space closer to the University of Houston, but not so much in the Upper Kirby/Montrose area.
  22. IronTiger
    Besides the whole "WTC 7 was done with controlled explosives" stuff, the conspiracy theory itself makes no sense. First off, thinking that the government was involved would be giving them too much credit, especially the Bush administration, which was widely believed to be incompetent and had been in office only less than 9 months at the time, and trying to build a plan like that would be impossible, or the plot had been brewing for years and Bush & co. were just patsies. Then what would be the payoff? A temporary surge of patriotism and approval ratings? After all, the gas price was already pretty low at the time. The economy also took a nosedive, too...all those seem like NEGATIVE things, and if the government had this all planned out, then, well, that would be remarkably ill-thought out, wouldn't it? Finally, if there really was a conspiracy theory, why are you still here? The Snowden leaks revealed that the government was spying on its own citizens. The government would've known who was trying to spread word of the truth, and have most of you "liquidated" through some sort of black ops team.
  23. IronTiger
    The presence of fire doesn't necessarily dictate building problems, it's the heat in that fire. A house fire could gut the interior of a house but it can be restored by sanding down burned floors and doing a few comparatively minor renovations. A smaller, but HOTTER fire could do the same damage. The HEAT given off by the fires at the main WTC buildings were probably the bigger factor in the WTC 7 collapse. And secondly, there's no such as a "perfect demolition job". In controlled demolitions, a "perfect" job is to completely demolish the building they're supposed to get and don't hit anything else or let anyone get hurt. I spent the last couple of minutes while typing this to look at a few building demolitions. The Houston Club kinda had this neat twisting effect going down, the Plaza Hotel had one side start to crumble while the elevator/stairs shaft went the other way, Kyle Field had the big concrete thing crash into the ground while the sides went, the Prudential went down with the biggest chunk kind of started falling, the Macy's Building kind of crumpled INSIDE on itself, they're all very different. ALL of them have the BOOM BOOM BOOM and the subsequent smoke of the TNT coming out that was carefully laid after the building was gutted. I'm not even a demolitions expert and came up with all that. Drills happen all the time. In 2004, they did a hurricane scenario in Louisiana called Hurricane Pam, a slow-moving Category 3 hurricane that caused storm surge on levees. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit, so it only makes sense Hurricane Katrina was masterminded by the Bush administration to cause panic and discord, right? Right? The 1993 transcripts do offer an intriguing look into dealing with informants, but that information has been public for the last 20 years. The best I can find related to that when dealing with reputable (read: real) sources is that the FBI probably bungled an early chance to stop the bombing at an early point. I don't know how the whole "the bombing was done with the knowledge and direction of the FBI" thing came from, but it was probably from the same place about Barack Obama promoting gun control to create a New World Order. "You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan
  24. IronTiger
    I believe H-E-B also owns most of its shopping centers it developed for its Pantry stores, and many supermarkets still have "sleeper" sites even in markets that they no longer operate in. H-E-B owns a bunch of Dallas sites, I know Albertsons still has control of their Waco location closed in 2006 (McLennan County Appraisal District), and I wouldn't be surprised if they owned some San Antonio locations still as well (in fact, I think I read somewhere that they did make sure some weren't used for grocery).
  25. IronTiger

    METRORail Green Line

    IronTiger replied to a topic in Transit

    I think it's required by law, if the train breaks down or something. That's why there's usually walkways near roller coasters if it breaks down.
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